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Alter Ego Explained

by LEX the Lexicon Artist

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1.
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. I’m really excited to share this new audio commentary series with you. In this series, I will be discussing the themes, concepts, and inspirations for each song, as well as inviting some of my collaborators to talk about the work they did for their tracks. So if you haven’t listened to the album in full, go ahead and turn this off, and go do that right now before you keep listening . But if you’ve finished it, let’s talk about this album as a whole. The term “alter ego” is usually used to refer to a second personality, an alternate persona someone adopts that’s different from their typical self. There are many types of different alter egos in popular culture: secret identities of a superhero or supervillain, depictions of multiple personality disorder, or someone’s artist persona that is distinguished from their identity in other contexts, like Donald Glover/Childish Gambino, Sonny Moore/Skrillex, Marshall Mathers/Eminem/Slim Shady, to name a few. Some fictional examples of Alter Egos that inspired me include Father and his homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Dr. Horrible and Billy from Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, Mob and ???% from Mob Psycho 100, Pink Diamond and *spoilers* from Steven Universe, Tyler Durden and *spoilers* from Fight Club, and probably a whole lot of other alter egos I can’t remember right now. My goal in creating “Alter Ego” was to explore all those variations, as well as the kind of alter ego most of us already have: different sides of us we show to different parts of our lives, such as friends, family, work, romantic relationships, strangers, and more. Depending on who you are, some of those faces might reflect a more “authentic” you than others; or, they may not differ from each other very much in terms of authenticity. You may consider all these sides reflective of the “true” you in some way. As a loose concept album, “Alter Ego” also explores our relationships with many things we consider a part of us that take on their own identities, such as ambition, anger, desire, past selves, hypothetical clones, and even our phones. It puts them in a patchwork to highlight how they interact with each other to create one complete person. The other way to interpret the title “Alter Ego” is to think of the word “alter” as a verb. When you parse it like that, “alter ego” is a command for one to change their ego. It’s almost like a computer command, something you’d type into a command prompt that will kick off a change in the target’s ego. That reflects the other goal of the album, which is to chronicle a gradual shift in my ego over the last two years, from raging to something more zen. There is an overall narrative arc in the album; the song order tells a somewhat linear story about one person’s journey through anxiety and disillusionment, and how they change as a result. But, it’s less of a defined story than an assortment of musings loosely tied together by a common theme and narrative thread. This kind of organization was inspired by one of my favorite concept albums, The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance, which executes on its concept in a similar way. I tried to capture the structure and feeling of that album in my own style. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Ready to explore the album?
2.
Question 03:31
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. For every song I’m going to start with a one-line sentence that explains what the song is about. All except Question. Because Question is about NOTHING. Question is not an opening track, nor is it an opening skit. It’s somewhere in between. I will admit that as much as I like being funny, I’m not very good at comedy. I am also not very good at coming up with a skit-based framing device for a concept album. Trust me, as a rapper I’m obligated to give it a try eventually. But it’ll have to be another day. And so Question was born. It’s kind of an easy, slow, yet bizarre intro to the album. In fact, its working title was simply “Intro”. Question doesn’t hit on any themes. It doesn’t have a narrative structure. Despite the line “high concept got me in the higher echelon”, it isn’t even a conceptual song. That line is there ironically, because although the rest of the album is highly conceptual, Question is functionally just a lyrical flex. All it does is ask one simple question: “Do you feel me yet?” which is then followed by a slurry of hashtag rap brags about why you should be. As is probably obvious to those who have been following me long enough, Question is a nod to and reprise of “L.E.X.” I’ve always maintained that even though I find it funny and fun to perform, and even though it continues to resonate with listeners and grab people’s attention at live shows, I am not that proud of some of the writing in L.E.X. To current me, it’s crude and a bit tasteless. But if people like it, there has to be some merit to it. So I decided to give it a do-over. There are references to “L.E.X.” everywhere: “Best ass in the bay, pita chips” / “the fellas say I got the best ass in the bay / got it eating pita chips” “Wetter flow than hentai, tentacles” “got me fucked up like hentai tentacles” “Not a no, not a yes, quite possibly” “not a no, not a yes, to some extent” The crude ridiculousness of “L.E.X.” is also present in lines like “crushing auto-thots like I’m mf megatron”. But not everything can be a retread, so there’s some new gold in here too. One of my favorite lines is: “I’m barred out like Japanese genitals. Your bars SUCC, meme man, no vegetals.” I wanted to incorporate my taste in memes to some extent, and somehow I thought to rhyme genitals with vegetals… hence referencing Meme Man, his hatred of vegetals, and the non-sequitur SUCC. I like that the bar has a non-sequitur feel to it too. It also has a retroactive meaning. Bars with no vegetals are like bars with no nutritional value. Empty calories. Aka trash bars. Another bar I enjoyed writing was “I’ve been smoking all the L’s, Light Yagami”. I thought that was pretty good wordplay sewn into an anime reference. If that’s not nerdcore I don’t know what is. I acknowledge that essentially “re-doing” “L.E.X.” can be seen as either totally unnecessary and superfluous, or super fucking awesome. So yeah, you either love it or hate it. No big deal. Even if you hate it, it’s so short you’ll be onto the next one in no time. Or it might start growing on you, who knows? I want to thank Cecil, my audio engineer on this album, for reproducing part of this beat. It was an old beat I purchased years ago from Unlearn the World, and the stems I received were incomplete. So thank you for making it usable for the track! And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. One last thing: I know my name is long, but I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, not just Lexicon. Please, promoters, try to get it right? Maybe?
3.
I Know 03:57
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. I Know is a song about how other people perceive me, and how I react to those perceptions. It’s also a brag track. Basically I wrote I Know to be a spiritual successor to Peep Game. I wanted it to inhabit the same kind of role that Peep Game plays in Raging Ego. Even though “Question” is the first track, it isn’t really an opener. It’s like a “fakeout”. It plays more of a comedic “intro skit” role that leads into “I Know”, which is the true album opener, and I wanted the true opener to reflect the things people liked about peep game: braggadocious, funny, hard-hitting, heavy, and very indicative of my personality. I wanted to write another huge, energetic song to open my live sets, something that people could sing along to. I wanted it to appeal to not only existing fans who love “peep game” and raging ego, but also brand new listeners who are hearing me for the first time. Most importantly, I wanted a song that I would have a massively good time performing. I think I succeeded with that last one because “I Know” is one of my favorite tracks on the album. It just cracks me up. It’s so over the top and ridiculous. There are some lines in there that I think I’m going to make into stickers because they’re just straight-up wacky. As an album, Alter Ego can get pretty serious and even dark, but this is a shining exception to that rule. It’s not just upbeat, it’s pretty funny, and I welcome any opportunity to train that comedic muscle. The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek commentary on people’s reactions to me. Or according to Doug: “This song is about boundaries.” As artists, we get a lot of the same feedback over and over, so why not smile and nod and eat it up super obnoxiously and say “yeah I know”? Obviously I’m playing up the rockstar ante and exaggerating my ego, since this is the starting point of the album and the Raging Ego is still alive and back for Round 2. It brings us back to a simpler time, a more familiar mindset, while putting a new spin on it using new experiences I now have. Each verse addresses a different group of people and a different type of reaction. Verse 1 targets the haters, doubters, and spouters of platitudes who don’t peep my game. I assert my confidence in the LEX ego, and double down on my convictions. Verse 2 is poking fun at existing fans who know and love me. It’s a campy brag fest about my psychic powers and a guide for how they should best interact with me, including a warning against creeps. Verse 3 is more nuanced. It appears to be directed again towards fans who say nice things about me, but I think it’s actually me expressing my insecurities about not living up to their expectations or not being a good example for what they see in me, for example, an activist. It’s the most honest verse in the song, because I come straight out and admit that I’m not explicitly political in any of my work; all I do is write a bunch of songs about my experience, which in the grand scheme seems kind of frivolous. So I get a bit self-conscious when thinking about myself as a role-model for Asian American activists and feminists, even though deep down I know that as far as role models go, you could do a lot worse. So I open up about my true goals: I just want to make cool stuff people can relate to and see themselves in. And if you like it and speak well of it, that’s exactly what it was meant to do, and that’s what’ll encourage me to continue. On the production side, I hired Mozart von Robot, also known as Vincent EL, who also produced peep game and glasses remix. Since they live in Sweden, we worked together over Facebook chat to iron out the specifics. I wanted a brassy sample and huge drums similar to peep game, and the Eminem song “We Made You”. Vincent said they did not listen to Eminem, so I sent them the instrumental and they programmed the brass samples and other instruments from that jump off point, and ended up with something that really just hit the spot. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Did you enjoy it? Thanks! I know.
4.
The Redesign 04:19
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. The Redesign is a song about phone and technology addiction, through the metaphor of a dysfunctional relationship. The Redesign is one of the earliest songs in the life cycle of Alter Ego. I began work on it in mid-2018, shortly after the release of Raging Ego. How do I know that? Well, mostly because of this. In June 2018, I visited New York City and saw a book titled “How To Break Up With Your Phone” on a shelf of new reads at the Strand Bookstore near Union Square. I never bought the book, probably because I knew it would never work on me. (As you probably know I have a bad case of phone addiction.) Despite not picking it up, the title of the book stuck in my mind throughout the trip, and sometime later I began to write a song based on that title. My goal was to draw parallels between phone addiction and an obsessive and codependent relationship. To achieve that goal was to conjure up an unseemly amount of phone-related double entendres to use throughout. As many as there are, the first verse is supposed to be pretty ambiguous as far as who or what the protagonist is referring to. There’s nothing that indicates that the object of their affections is an inanimate object. All they’re doing is describing their situation and the way it makes them feel, and so it could still conceivably be a standard breakup song at that point. The second verse is where we start lifting the curtain and making the metaphor obvious. I wanted the Phone to come across as a whiny lovesick fuckboi who is hard to get rid of, because he’ll remind you of all that he does for you, all that you owe him, and the contract you made to be together forever. Phones were made to be addictive and depended upon, and so are some people. I picked Coolzey to be the featured vocalist because I knew he could effectively deliver the plaintive appeal of a sympathetic villain you love to hate. Who hasn’t had a Phone Fuckboi at some point in their life? The third verse is where all gloves come off (you know, so you can swipe on your phone. I have phone screen-compatible gloves, by the way.) The protagonist asserts themselves and the need to change their life, and with every reference to the Phone makes it clear that “you’re just a phone; you have no real power over me.” The double entendres get very literal until the metaphor is unquestionable. We think they’ve won the battle, until you realize at the end that they haven’t. They’re not breaking up with their phone; they’re just trading it in for a new model. Despite all the posturing and affirmations, they failed. This is the first sign of bleakness and despair that indicates that change isn’t so easy, which comes back to haunt the protagonist many times throughout the album. This song isn’t drawing from any real relationship of mine. It’s 80% about my phone addiction and 20% inspired by various personal connections I’ve had over the years. In the context of the album, The Redesign is actually the first step on our protagonist’s journey to alter the ego. Question and I Know are a unit of strong openers, but content-wise, they reinforce the status quo and are essentially rehashing and improving on successful elements of previous works. The Redesign is the first track that experiments with a type of sound, storytelling, and literary conceit that I haven’t tried before. It’s relaxed but not slow; it’s chill but not too soft; it deals with a concept outside of my past repertoire. Most importantly, it’s the start of our story. Our protagonist feels their inertia, notices their problem, and attempts a change. Thematically, anthropomorphizing the Phone is meant to show us how our daily technology can become an extension of ourselves, in the way that a significant other can form a part of you that is hard to give up. Steve of the Dying of Exposure podcast pointed out something that was really interesting to me. Starting from The Redesign, and including songs like All The Time, Famous, and Augmented, many songs in this album embody the theme “Alter Ego” within themselves: they seem like they might be about one thing, but actually, they’re about something else - maybe. We don’t know which face is the true face of the song. Just like you don’t know which face is the true face of me. How fun! And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Welp, time to scroll Facebook until my Face falls off!
5.
Infosession 04:53
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Infosession is a song about career anxiety, corporate disillusionment, and the search for one’s purpose in life. Infosession is the first song to appear in this album that uses a style that’s new to me. I honestly don’t even know if I can describe this style. It’s glitchy, ethereal, bitcrushy, and spacey. It was created by producer Ronin Op F, who is a video game music composer, electronic producer and Materia Collective member. His compositions include the “puzzle dev” soundtrack and the album “Signals from Shibuya”. Ronin and I met through the music scene in the Bay Area, and became close friends. After working together in live performance contexts, in which he played violin, we decided to collaborate as vocalist and producer for a track whose fate we did not know yet. After a couple of iterations, we planted the seeds for what would eventually become Infosession. As part of the first half of the album, Infosession is a story rooted in reality. It’s my reflection on and response to an external event. Is it based on one specific infosession I attended? Probably not, but it’s definitely an approximation of many. It’s an average of many career fairs and infosessions I’ve attended over the years while at UC Berkeley, for every kind of company from non-profits to startups to management consulting firms. The thoughts in these lyrics are also a fictionalized account of what versions of me might have been thinking sitting in a chair at each of those fairs. My characterization of this general infosession might seem somewhat negative, and at points I do sound like I am criticizing all corporate life and people who choose that path. This isn’t an opinion I hold now, but this song was created earlier in the production cycle, which is one of the reasons it appears earlier in the track order. My feelings on people’s life decisions have since changed thanks to experiences I had later, some of which are detailed in the second half of the album. So if you will, interpret this as an experience of an unreliable narrator who is beginning to realize this path isn’t for them, but hasn’t yet cracked the surface of self-actualization. In fact, they’re asking those exact questions in this song: What is my purpose? Was it all worth it? They have just started on the path of being jaded, and she still believes all people should be like her. This is how they see the world. The lines about Asian women have to do with the common pattern of Asian-Americans facing a bamboo ceiling. Despite Asian people being disproportionately represented in many industries such as law and software, they are underrepresented in upper management. For example, 33% of software engineers in Bay Area tech companies are of Asian descent but only 10% are corporate officers. This phenomenon is reinforced by the model minority stereotype that Asians are good at putting their heads down and doing hard work, but not at being creative or playing leadership roles. This myth can prevent Asian-Americans from climbing up the corporate and academic ladders. I make a cynical observation that the infosession room is predominantly Asian women, who face both bamboo and glass ceilings. I question how many of them will make it to the great heights they’re being promised, and whether they’re sacrificing their own dreams to buy into this way of life. Am I right or wrong? Who knows. It’s also a restatement of my thesis: that I don’t think this path will yield the goals I want for myself. To provide a stark contrast to that cynicism is Klopfenpop. Having played the role of producer on party hop and artist anthem, he features in this track as a vocalist. My instruction to him was: scummy white dudebro. He delivered a glib extollation of the snacks and benefits of “Small Biz Incorporated”, and closed it off with a not-so-subtle invitation into the pyramid scheme. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Honestly, after COVID, I would so go to another one of these.
6.
Self Care 04:20
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Self Care is a song about the good and the bad of self-care. Self Care was born of a single rhyme that came to me halfway between sleep and waking: “Self Care, Hell Yeah” And that became a song. Of course, it goes without saying that the working title of Self Care was “Self Care Hell Yeah”. However, by the time the masters were finished, I had been abbreviating it as Self Care for so long that I decided that “Self Care Hell Yeah” was too long. The original idea was for me to contemplate options for self care with a “Self Care Angel” and a “Self Care Devil”. I chose Shubzilla and Mikal to play those roles because as friends they each embody the archetype of “Caring Aunty” and “Chaotic Uncle” respectively. The loose prompt was to offer advice for me, the narrator, who is seeking suggestions for self care, while the Angel and Devil each have their own interpretations of self-care. Is self care going for a run and seeing a therapist? Or is it eating chocolate and tweeting uncontrollably? One gives you long-term benefits and the other gives you short-term satisfaction. Both have pros and cons, and sometimes what you need depends on the situation. Shubzilla wrote a verse mostly directed towards me, offering kind but firm advice, reinforcing my self-esteem. Mikal kHill not only takes it the complete opposite direction, he also doesn’t address me at all, instead talking about what HE does for HIS own self care, which in a roundabout way IS his way of giving advice. I thought this was actually really great and telling, because sometimes self care is about being as self-centered as possible, shutting out everyone else’s needs and focusing on your own. So it ended up working great for the theme anyway, and the song evolved from Angels and Devils Arguing on Your Shoulder into a sort of meditation on what self-care means to each of these speakers. When mixing this, Cecil asked me, “Is the beat for Self Care supposed to be so depressing?” It kind of just turned out that way. He pointed out the contrast between the lyrical content and the very minor key. The composition was a simple bass line I had written, which Mikal kHill edited slightly by switching it around a bit, and then produced in full. Because of the sounds and instruments he used, it ended up sounding quite gloomy. But I think it works for where it’s located in the album, because narratively, the protagonist is at a low point. They’re lost, confused and stagnant because of things like phone addiction, career anxiety and personal addictions eating them up, and they’re looking for solutions and a next step while in a very dark place. What’s good y’all, Shubzilla here talking about my verse for LEX the Lexicon Artist’s Self Care. This verse lists a lot of things that I would do to engage in healthy self care. Reading a book, having a bubble bath. A lot of times my sisters and I will talk about feelings of self-worth, of burnout. And it’s really important to remind ourselves that you are worth a damn, and you’ve accomplished so much that you can afford to take however long you need to recharge yourself, so that you can be present for yourself, your friends, your family, and your community. So whenever Lex asked me to do Self Care Hell Yeah, I was working at a really toxic work environment and I was super fucking over it, and I knew I was on my way out, so that sort of fueled the entire verse. The irony of Self Care Hell Yeah is it definitely also deals with a lot of negative coping mechanisms I have, from drinking to dealing with anger. So yeah, that whole line, the best line in the verse is the line where it’s like, “On any given moment don’t wanna go to the office, call every manager tell them to suck two dicks. Neither mine.” Like, that epitomized how I felt at the time, and the song was a really great release for that. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Now go do some self care!
7.
Party Hop 08:04
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Party Hop is a song about time management, public transportation, and the nightly responsibilities of a modern-day social butterfly. It’s not really a secret that Party Hop sounds pretty different from the rest of the album. There’s a couple reasons for that, but perhaps the biggest reason for it is that it was actually from a different era of LEX! This song is by far the oldest song on the album when it comes to inception and basic composition. I came up with the hook, most of the verses, and a songwriter’s demo in late 2017. Here’s what that sounded like. I came up with the hook, as well as the basic riff and chords, after getting Indian food with my friend Jordan back in Berkeley, CA. This Indian place isn’t even OPEN anymore (and not just because of pandemic)! During our lunch, we mentioned the topic “party hopping”, as he had invited me to a party of some mutual friends later that evening, and I was considering going even though I already had other plans. “Maybe I should do some party hopping,” I said. Almost by instinct, a tune started forming in my head. “I’m gonna party hop, wooooah. Cause one party’s not nearly enough.” And the rest is history. That night after I got home, instead of attending that party, I went straight to logic and started entering the notes that would eventually become the skeleton demo you just heard. The craziest thing is that almost nobody who is currently my fan had even heard of me in late 2017, and yet the song had so much staying power that it made it to an album in 2020. I knew from the start that the hook was catchy enough to be single material, but it wasn’t anywhere near complete for Raging Ego, and it didn’t fit thematically. Not that it’s a great thematic fit for Alter Ego, either, but it does make a little more sense. In the Alter Ego storyline, “Party Hop” comes after “Self Care”, which is a meditation on how to feel better about my own aimlessness. “Party Hop” signifies the path that I end up choosing - hedonism and high levels of work and activity, which is consistent with the way I actually deal with my problems. After heavy socializing, extroversion, and productivity, I redirect my energy internally, leading into the title track, where the album takes its major turn. You can learn more about that in the next commentary track. I’ve long known that this song has staying power and would make a great single. But I also deliberately chose it, because it sounds very different from the rest of the album. I wanted to play with expectations as well as do a little deceptive advertising. I wanted to trick audiences into thinking the album was gonna sound and feel a certain way, and then have it be completely different, just like the anime opening of Death Parade. As the name suggests, Death Parade is a somber show, but its opening is peppy and bright, sharply contrasting with the tone of the series. I loved that contrast because it not only deceives the audience, but also brings some lightheartedness to a very heavy series. I wanted to recreate that for the album release, and so I decided to lead with this song. When I started performing this song live, I introduced it as an open letter to public transportation, specifically because of the line about BART. When I moved to NYC and I started playing shows in places that weren’t familiar with BART, I began explaining the line before even starting the song. So in my head, the song morphed from a party song into a song about trains. The single art created by Danji’s Designs incorporates the two public transportation train systems in the two U.S. cities I’ve lived in, the Bay Area and New York City. On the left is the Antioch train, formerly known as Pittsburg Bay Point, which is the yellow line. On the right is the 7 train, which is the purple line that spans Queens and Manhattan. I picked these trains to represent each city not only because they’re trains I would take frequently, but also because they’re complementary colors. Me jumping across from the top of one train to the other signifies my move to a different city, and making a jump to a brand new life. This song was created via a similar process to “Artist Anthem”. I knew after making the songwriter’s demo that it would need plenty of improvement. I also knew early on that I wanted Klopfenpop to work on the track, as we previously had great success creating Artist Anthem, a pop-punk track that was heavy on organic instrumentation like guitars and bass. It stayed mostly faithful to the demo, but added many elements and touches that elevated the song. Hi, this is Josh, intermittently known as Klopfenpop. And Lex asked me to talk a little about some of the production candy sprinkled throughout this track that I produced for them called Party Hop. Let’s take a look. So right there coming out of that hook, instead of a crash I used the sound of a bus air brake releasing. Which is always one of my favorite sounds that you can encounter in the world, but it was surprisingly hard to find because the actual sound that you typically hear when a bus air brake releases, 1) buses don’t make that same sound anymore, it’s usually a lot more cold, cutoff *TCHHH*, but also the one that we’re used to hearing in media, in movies and TV, is sort of the platonic ideal, hyper realistic version that doesn’t reflect the actual sound we encounter in buses when we interact with them in real life. So it was pretty tough to actually end up designing one that sounded like the platonic ideal I was used to in my head. Anyway, here it is on its own. And then here it is one more time in context. Alright, so I have a little story to set up the next break. Oh, right here, vibraslap. I mean it’s a CAKE nod, but mostly because vibraslap is always awesome. But this guy named Paul Wright put out this transitional EP between his phase of being a mediocre white Christian rapper, and getting signed to a big Christian record label and being a mediocre Christian Jack Johnson that still tried to be a rapper, I dunno, it was weird. But there was one song that stuck out to me called “Microphone Check” not because he pretended to freestyle it, which he did, but because of a breakdown that had the sound of friends playing at a pool in the background. No Paul, you can’t have the mic right now. But just hearing those sounds in a musical context, even though they weren’t lined up rhythmically, always made me think, “Oh I can use those someday as percussion elements.” So in this break, coming out of Lex talking about how much there is to do in California, I’m like, “Okay, I wanna evoke California in this drum break.” And so leading up to it, I have: the bouncing of a diving board is part of a fill, and then where a crash would be, instead it’s the splash. Here it is isolated, and here it is in context. Real quick before we move on, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the best line of that old Paul Wright song, which is obviously when he said “Grabbing the microphone, get high on God and not the weed”. *LMAO* I know. Oh, before I go, I did wanna talk about the sample that plays when Lex says “‘Bout to party bounce into outer space, c’mon.” Did you hear it? That’s actually audio from the original Apollo 11 launch. Here it is isolated. Oh, and there’s this thing. But that’s just me going *pop*. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Oh, will you look at the time! I gotta run. It’s time to...
8.
Alter Ego 11:32
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Alter Ego is a song about identity, cloning, and the many alter egos that live within all of us. Alter Ego is the title track of the album, and it occupies a very important position in the middle of the track order - also known as Track 1 on Side B. Remember those things? My vision for this track was a minimalistic, concept-driven song with a strong, catchy hook and relatively sparse instrumentation. I wanted it to be the stripped-down core from which all the other songs sprang to life, like an origin seed. I wanted it to have the feeling of not being an album single, but a deep-cut that would be profoundly appreciated and enjoyed by fans who paid attention. The underrated track that people would talk about for years to come. Of course, it’s ALSO the title track and features a major guest, so it was never going to be ignored. It just needed to sound like it might’ve been. I wanted lots of control over this song, so I decided to produce it myself. The musical ideas started with the main melodic riff in the chorus and the ghostly voice synth. I used simple piano chords and a heavily swung, lurching boombap rhythm to give it a very open and staccato feel. From the start I knew I wanted the chorus to be stacked with higher and lower octave vocals for a creepy effect. Finally I added a bunch of weird synths and this bullshit whistling west coast lead that doesn’t have any reason to be there other than, fuck it, it sounds old school and it sounds good. As a functional entity, the “Alter Ego” song serves as the dividing line between the outward-focused first half and the introspective second half. You may have noticed that the first half is very feature-heavy, which reflects my intentional effort to collaborate with more voices after a featureless first album, Raging Ego. After that album came out, I got a lot of feedback from fans who wanted me to collaborate with more people. It was also around that time that I started meeting more artists who wanted to work with me, so I took that advice to heart. The first half of this album, with its many features, is not only representative of that change, but it’s also symbolic of the part of me that interacts with my surroundings. It’s an external self-examination using the outside world as a reference. The second half of the album, as we’ll get into, is an internal self-examination. Like Raging Ego, it’s mostly featureless, but carries a very different energy. The second half is a deep dive into self, away from the realm of real problems and real people, and into the abstract waters of fever dreams and psychedelic journeys. It’s weirder, wackier, a little more unhinged, and way more metaphorical. It chronicles a gradual transformation, and how egos within egos can take on their own identities. So the track “Alter Ego”, of course, is the gateway into that world. It’s the bridge that connects reality and fantasy. It’s the mediator - to use Freud’s theory, some might call it the ego that connects superego and id. But what’s its own identity? Lyrically, Alter Ego is probably the song that most clearly lays out the core theme of the album, which is the way that multiple sides of a person can come together to form a walking contradiction. Going from there, I split that topic down further into two hypotheticals that I explore in the first two verses. The first verse asks, “Is there a real me?” to which the answer is “probably not, they’re all real, but some me’s may feel more authentic to me than others.” I reference a really interesting concept suggested by Neil Patrick Harris’s character in the web short Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog, which is that people are like pie. So the layer of identity that I put out for people to see IS actually the one that’s the most authentic, although there are different layers that live in between. The second verse asks: “If there are multiple mes, what would happen if I separated them?” I imagined a scenario where I was able to clone myself and endow it with the sentience of one of my egos. What kinds of moral implications are involved? What if I asked them to live a life I didn’t want to live? It’s a similar question to the one Rick and Morty asks in the episode “The ABCs of Beth”, where Beth is given a choice to be her authentic and actualized self, living out her full potential, while her clone fulfills her motherly duties for her. Oh, and there’s an obvious throwaway line that’s a reference to our feature here, which I think most people are going to get, and there’s not much to say about it other than when I wrote the line, I thought it was fucking HILARIOUS. Speaking of the feature verse: I needed to get lots of things right with this song, so it was one of the hardest ones to write. After I wrote the first two verses, it didn’t seem complete. But when Schaffer’s verse came in, the song went from good to awesome. That final verse really helped the track deliver on its intent. What I like the most about his verse is that he spends an entire 16 bars talking about alter egos while not saying a single personal thing about himself. I found that crypticness very authentic, which is exactly what I wanted. For a song like this that deals with big concepts on a broad level, it was a perfect complement. Hello, my name is Schaffer the Darklord, and I am the featured guest on the title track from LEX the Lexicon Artist’s album Alter Ego. I was psyched to get this assignment. LEX is one of my favorite rappers, one of my favorite live performers, and one of the very best tourmates I’ve ever had the pleasure of traveling with. When we were on tour together in the fall of 2019, she told me about some of her plans for the Alter Ego album, which was going to be the followup to her debut album Raging Ego. When we got home from tour, she sent me materials for a song that she wanted me to do a guest verse on, and I was even more psyched. The beat was awesome, the verse that she had demo’ed was awesome, the hook she had written was awesome, the concept of exploring one’s alter ego really spoke to me, and then on top of that this was going to be her new album’s title track. So as far as guest verse requests go, this was a slam dunk. But then, it wasn’t. When I sat down to write my parts for this song, I absolutely labored over it. I wrote stuff, I rewrote stuff, I threw away everything I’d written, I started over from scratch, etc etc. I think she’d given me several weeks to finish this verse, and I didn’t submit my parts until right at the deadline. In fact I got other guest verse requests after I got hers, and I finished those first because they were all a lot easier to write. I can say confidently that Alter Ego was one of the most difficult writing assignments I’d ever been given. You see, I thought it was going to be easy, because I thought I understood this concept from my own point of view. Early on in my career I saw myself as this nerdcore supervillain character, because I had a secret identity. Because early on, I learned to compartmentalize these two different sides of my personality. There was the real me, Mark Schaffer, which is who I was when I was with my friends and family, and then there was Schaffer the Darklord, this exaggerated cartoonish version of me, that I would play on stage. And I kept these two sides separate so that I could keep my fans at an emotional distance, and still be a sincere version of myself with my loved ones. And that worked for several years. But in 2013 I released a concept album called Sick Passenger. This record’s mission was to examine some of the issues I had explored in my real life therapy, like addiction, depression, and my struggle with balancing these two sides of myself. And in doing so my goal was to make a record that would be revealing, and make myself vulnerable to my fans. But like, even that vulnerable version of me that I put on the record was compromised, because the story on the record featured a number of embellishments for the sake of the narrative. Or at least I told myself that it was for the sake of the narrative. My real life therapist would later identify that the elements of insincerity that I added to the story were really there to protect myself from being too vulnerable with my fans. And sure enough this kind of backfired on me, because a lot of my fans really connected with that record, and then started interacting with me in a different way. They wanted to share their stories of their own mental health struggles with this person that they really identified with, and then I felt an obligation to be this “real” version of myself that I had played on the record. And then to make matters even WORSE, this whole time I had a corporate dayjob for 12 years, where I kept my other career Schaffer the Darklord secret from all my colleagues. So for 40 hours a week I was playing a 4th version of me, and after years of doing this it kind of spiraled out of control. Instead of 2 me’s, I had developed multiple me’s, that I would turn on and off for the sake of whichever audience I was with at the time. Now despite all of this, I do feel like I know who I am, but I don’t feel like anybody else really does. And that is unfortunately by my own design. The line in my verse that I think is the most revealing is the Darth Vader line. Which goes, “On stage I posture like I’m Darth Vader and make noise. In real life, I’m more like Anakin but Jake Lloyd. Giving the stiffest delivery of a shittily written script, disappointing critics then disappearing to quit and split.” I grew up, and remain, a huge fan of the character of Darth Vader. He’s just this perfect menacing badass with very few details about his backstory, literally hidden behind a suit of armor. And as a kid I always daydreamed, wondering “what was the man who became Darth Vader really like?” So in 1999, I was thrilled when The Phantom Menace was released, because I thought I was gonna finally learn about Anakin Skywalker and what had happened to him to make him Darth Vader. But then I was sorely disappointed with what I got. I got a lackluster backstory, poorly written dialogue, unconvincingly delivered by child actor Jake Lloyd. And I didn’t blame Jake Lloyd for it. I blamed George Lucas, who I felt had personally disappointed me by not giving me the story that I felt I deserved. And I feel that my use of multiple versions of me has been a tactic that was fueled by not wanting to disappoint my fans the way my storytelling hero had disappointed me. Lex teased me when I finally did submit my verse by saying something like, and I’m paraphrasing here, “It’s so you to write 16 bars about alter egos, and not actually reveal anything real about yourself.” I guess that’s true. But that feedback was just as revealing to me as the process of writing this verse had been. I genuinely feel that Lex’s album Alter Ego is a masterpiece. And I’m sure I’ll be peeling layers away from it during additional listens over the following years. And I am honored that she invited me to be a small part of it. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Up next, we dive deep into my psyche in Alter Ego, Side B. Muahahaha.
9.
Augmented 06:08
Augmented is a song about cybernetic enhancements, reproductive rights, and a really weird doctor’s appointment. I believe that Augmented is the first track, aside from Party Hop, that I wrote for the second album. I vividly recall starting on it almost immediately after I released Raging Ego. At the time Raging Ego was released, I was on vacation in New York and collecting ideas and inspiration for the new project. At the time I was particularly inspired by the modern art, augmented reality, and virtual reality exhibits I visited, and developed an early working idea of an album about cyborgification. I envisioned it as a human’s transitional journey from organic to synthetic, with Augmented being one of the first steps the human takes to augment their physical body. So I began working on the song over a gritty, industrial beat by the artist Damn Selene. Needless to say, this album concept eventually went out the window, replaced by what you now know as Alter Ego. However, I decided to finish the song anyway, as I had always wanted to write about the personal experience I share in this song. When the topic comes up, which is almost never, I have always asserted that my experience of getting fitted with an IUD is the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Despite that, it’s also one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. When something has such a profound effect on your memory and your entire existence, you really have no choice but to write about it, even if it’s super personal, way too overshary, and incredibly fucking weird. And thus Augmented was brought into the world. The song describes the first step a fully organic human takes to control and augment their biological functions, by acquiring a mechanical implant. As a fan of futuristic sci-fi series like Psycho-Pass and Black Mirror, I decided to frame your average OB-GYN visit as a precarious underground mission set against the backdrop of a Handmaid’s Tale-esque dystopian regime, where the ruling government has taken away all reproductive rights. It’s a worst-case scenario imagination of a Trump administration and its conservative judge appointments, taken to its logical extreme. This was a fear I actually had around the time I first got my IUD, in November 2016, right after Trump was elected. Worried about what they would do to the availability of reproductive health services, I decided to get a long-term solution that would last me a while. And turns out that while Roe v Wade remains intact for now, the government really did fuck up on something related to public health, putting the nation’s lives in danger. Who would’ve thought? The Redesign shares some narrative similarities with Augmented. It couldn’t be a more different-sounding song, but it also uses a deceptive metaphorical framing device and a late reveal. We think the song is about a relationship, but turns out it’s about a phone. We think Augmented is about a dangerous quest, but it’s about a doctor’s appointment. Like The Redesign, Augmented doesn’t exactly let on what it’s about until at least the second verse, if you’re paying attention. But by the time you reach the end of the song, you know what it’s really about, and it subverts your expectations. Obviously I can’t end this commentary without talking about the most important line, the central thesis of the song, its raison d’etre: “I U Deez Nuts”. While I’m not going to explain what it really means, because that would ruin its mystique, I can tell you that it isn’t an action, but a state of being. One must ascend to a higher plane to achieve its true form and then one will be content and want for nothing more. This song is a rallying cry for a world where all may freely I U Deez Nuts. And don’t forget. This was the first line I wrote for this song. This is where it begins and where it ends. And thus concludes this I U Deez Nuts - I mean, Alter Ego Explained.
10.
Famous 08:02
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Famous is a song about intrusive thoughts, delusions of grandeur, and the dark side of Ambition. Famous is intentionally a huge departure from the sound of the rest of the album, although at this point, like with Raging Ego, I don’t know if Alter Ego really HAS a sound. Most notably, Famous is the only song apart from”party hop” that has majority singing vocals and features a rap break. Most other songs feature rap verses and a singing hook (or a rapped hook, although that’s more of an exception than the norm this time around). I challenged myself with not only a different vocal style and skill set, but also a different type of songwriting. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I think I pulled off both pretty well, thanks to the impeccable production of my close friend and longtime collaborator Chris Songco, who you’ll hear later in the song Disappointment. More on that later! In the last album I experimented with genres like industrial metal (Luthor), surf punk (psych major), and pop punk (Artist Anthem), so this time I turned my attention to a genre that I’d been wanting to try for a long time: late two-thousands electro dance pop. Think Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Rihanna, or uh... Circus-era Britney? That’s right, it was time for LEX to become a pop star. With a really dated sound, which was an intentional choice. Here’s what I knew I wanted: 1) predominantly singing vocals, 2) a rap break like all good pop songs do, 3) a catchy prechorus hook, 4) a powerful hard-hitting chorus, and 5) strategically used heavy auto-tune. Now I’m the kind of person who isn’t shy about telling my engineer, this needs a SHIT TON of auto-tune. It’s not that I can’t sing - as Cecil will tell you, making the song sound the way it does requires me to sing pretty much exactly on key, with pitch correction added mostly for the robotic effect. Although let’s not talk about how many takes this whole thing took to record. [closet takes] My god this song was hard to do. Anyway, I’m not a vocal purist and I recognize the value of using pitch correction to make it sound industry-standard. So I wanted to take it a step further and use it for dramatic stylistic effect. That being said, as I mentioned earlier, all of this still required me to actually sing, and record myself singing, which ended up being a totally different wheelhouse from recording myself rapping. I was scared to do it, and I overcame that fear. Guess what? It turned out pretty great! Concept-wise, I think Famous is one of the songs that hews the closest to the themes of Alter Ego, along with songs like Alter Ego and The Redesign. I wrote the first and second verses on a bus from San Francisco to Petaluma on my way to a video interview in Petaluma in March 2019. That video’s on my website. The driving idea of the song is: there is a part of me that wants all the glamour that comes from the lights and cameras. Multi-story penthouse, billboards on Times Square, luxury hotels and vacations, and enough money in the bank to add guac at Chipotle without worrying about it. What can I say? I am a person of taste. These are of course all far-off fantasies, but fantasies can feel very intense and real. They can brew up an intoxicating blend of ambition and delusion. Famous is the song about what your ambition would sound like as a real person whispering tempting messages in your ear. “Check out this future that I made with my mind.” “It’s with YOUR help that WE can get to MY goals.” When Ambition says “I want you”, they mean they want to CONTROL you. They want to work you physically, mentally, and emotionally until they can get what they’ve always imagined. “When I get everything, will you be there for me?” Notice how Ambition doesn’t say “if” - Ambition thinks it’s a sure thing that they will get everything, but what they’re not sure of is whether their original self will still be there once the empire has been built. When people think about fame, they worry about losing who they once were, and if they’ll lose touch with the friends and family they now have. The protagonist’s Ambition also has that anxiety, but it’s overshadowed by their overwhelming desires. If you analyze the lyrics from the perspective of Ambition, everything makes sense in context. The rap breakdown is one of the best examples of this. “I don’t ask for much, just a pledge of allegiance. You act an impostor, I’ll lend you my credence. Repress your emotions, I’ll empty your secrets, I’m keeping them all on the edge of their seats and they’ll never forget you, they’ll envy your genius, I’ll give you the best open ended agreement. You give me your all and I’ll take what you need, I’ll live in your soul and I’ll make you succeed.” Ambition is addressing who the protagonist is now, and how they’ll change with the help of Ambition. “You act an impostor, I’ll lend you my credence.” The protagonist has impostor syndrome. Ambition doesn’t, Ambition is the real deal. “Repress your emotions, I’ll empty your secrets.”The protagonist represses their emotions. Ambition will “empty your secrets” - spill the beans to appeal to the audience. And so on. You see how everything fits? Also here’s a fun fact: I was a little inspired by contract-making scenes from Disney, specifically The Little Mermaid and Princess and the Frog. The line “I don’t ask for much, just a pledge of allegiance” recalls Ursula’s promise in Poor Unfortunate Souls: “It won’t cost much, just your voice.” And “You give me your all and I’ll take what you need” is a loose reversal reinterpretation of “You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had”, which is Dr. Facilier’s ominous mantra in “Friends on the Other Side” - which pretty closely captures the warning this song is trying to give about overindulging in your delusions. So as glamorous as the song might sound, it’s literally about the dark side of fame. My longtime friend and musical collaborator Chris Songco was the producer of this track. He has a really good understanding of what kind of music I like, and I loved how he nailed the exact sound I was looking for. I remember the day he sent this beat to me on Facebook messenger saying “hey, I heard you were looking for a pop beat. Happy birthday!” I liked it so much that the beat has mostly stayed the same from inception to release, without any major changes. The only thing he added was a rap breakdown at my request, and he did that perfectly too. I want to shout out my engineer Cecil again for doing an excellent job mixing and mastering this track, adding various levels of pitch-correction and vocal effects to make everything sound polished and overproduced, which is the exact style I was going for. I especially like the blown-out distortion he added to the chorus, which gave the whole thing a light poppy Trent Reznor sound. I feel like Famous is really a step in the right direction of where the Lex project could go next. Yo! I’m Chris Songco, the producer behind the third single off Alter Ego “Famous”. This track to me is about the road to fame personified. The desire of fame like they’re a person and the appeal we all make to someone or something we deeply want. Sometimes with a dash of lunacy. LEX made a post for an instrumental with traces of the 2010 glam pop sound. I made the first skeleton for this track with the sentiment of artists such as Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship. But when LEX sent me her demo vocals over that skeleton, I got all of these like Nine Inch Nails industrial undertones so I knew I had to spice it up. I added a bit more crunch to the synths, a modal mixture switching between A major and minor, and a crazy breakbeat and I’m just really happy with how it turned out. It’s just this chaotic dance banger. It’s Famous and I hope you enjoy it. PS-My favorite part of this beat is the synth that happens in the chorus that goes doo doo doo doo dooo doo dooo doo. I think that’d just be super fun to play live lol. Yeah, thanks for having me on the track LEX. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. I gave you my all, you take what you need.
11.
Posturing 05:46
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Posturing is a song about fakeness, social media facades, and people who don’t walk their talk. “Posturing” is the closest we’ll get to an emotional successor of Luthor from Raging Ego. If “Famous” is ambition personified, then “Posturing” is anger personified. Typically my memory for how I began writing a song is pretty good, but I don’t quite remember exactly when or how I started writing Posturing. Possibly because I was blinded with ((ANGER)). What I do know about Posturing is the emotion that drove it to completion. It was this weird cocktail mix of rage, envy, frustration, and unrestrained self-indulgence. I had a lot of overwhelmingly negative and mean things to get out of my system, and I wanted to concentrate all of it in one go, create an ugly creature, and endow it with sentience. The speaker-creature in Posturing has grown jaded of a constant stream of fakeness on social media, but hasn’t figured out how to deal with those feelings, and more importantly, hasn’t yet learned that what other people do on social media is none of their business. They decry the talk-but-no-action people they see online and claim that they let their feet do the walking - but they also talk A LOT and make baseless claims. The creature is a big fucking hypocrite, but they are at least self-aware and acknowledge that they also do not know “what we’re doing” - the meaning of which is up to interpretation. What can be faked on social media? Success? Wokeness? Living a happy and authentic life? Nobody knows; we can’t really assume what’s going on in the lives of other people beyond what we see on the surface. The creature expresses that frustration and screams for liberation and understanding. This was the first song in the production cycle that had a big melodic hook that was heavily pitch-corrected for effect. I wanted it to throw back to Kanye in his song Heartless. I also wrote this song for the stage specifically: the call-and-response bridge was designed as a back-and-forth yell-fest with the audience. I think this track really embodies a darker and uglier side of what an Alter Ego could be. I do see Famous and Posturing as kind of a two-in-one, because both songs are written from the perspective of the emotional component-turned-alter-ego. Both are extreme reactions to some aspect of artistry and public life, with Famous presenting a positive and glamorous view, and Posturing presenting a negative and cynical one. Famous desires the attention while Posturing scorns the attention that others receive. Put the two together, and you get two contradicting sides of the same hypocritical person. The beat was created by Liz Grove, producer of the project Danger Grove. Liz and I have maintained a connection where she sends me beats that haven’t been assigned to Danger Grove or any other vocalist. By doing this, we’ve made two songs together - Narcissist and Expectations (feat. Shubzilla). Among the beats Liz sent me in 2019 were beats titled ShitBeat8 and ShitBeat25. Despite the name, I took a liking to ShitBeat25, and asked her if I could use it. She confirmed, but later discovered that the original ShitBeat25 project was no longer accessible. So, she took the time to reproduce the beat completely And thus concludes this Alter Ego explained. Despite what the creature said, I feel like I know what I was doing in this one.
12.
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. The Real Thing, Schrodinger’s Heart, and Loss of Ego make up what I call the “Loss of Ego Suite”. The three of them share one narrative thread, form a functional unit in the story arc of the album, and also have some musical similarities in production, mixing, and melodic motifs. All three beats were gifted to me by a producer named NSF, also known as Jeff Ward. I met Jeff in the Bay Area and liked a LOT of the beats that were featured on his instrumental albums. After lots of difficulty, I picked three to stitch together into a loose narrative within the narrative. If you want to hear his other beats, you can check them all out on Spotify under the artist NSF. This suite marks the point in our protagonist’s downward-spiraling internal journey where they have finally made it past the delusions of grandeur and the online posturing going on around them. Now they are forced to take a real look at themselves and their journey, all the events and emotions that have brought them to this point, and decide what, if anything, truly matters to them. There’s a name I give to the end result of this deep dive. I like to think that by the end of Loss of Ego, the protagonist has, in my words, “cracked the surface”. What does “cracking the surface” mean? It’s a moment, usually in altered consciousness, when you transcend your typical frame of thought and discover a truth about your life that significantly changes your values and worldview. Some might call it becoming one with the universe. It’s usually cathartic, and can feel enlightening, revelatory, spiritual, or even out-of-body. Imperfect analogs include being unplugged from the Matrix, attaining nirvana, or arriving at the Gate of Truth in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Cracking the surface can feel different for everyone, and can be induced by a variety of different things, such as chemicals, meditation, trauma, or performing human transmutation. So what is the protagonist’s cracked worldview like? Well, to put it shortly, they experience loss of ego. But in order to fully understand that, let’s take a look at how they got there. The Real Thing is a song about my journey over the last seven years, and how the smallest of decisions can make impacts on your life you would have never imagined The Real Thing is most similar to what anime fans would call a recap episode. It’s a look back on the protagonist’s life so far, or at least their life in the US from 2012 to 2019. It frames their journey as a result of the butterfly effect. It draws new conclusions, and asks new questions that help them look forward. The primary literary device that triggers the chain of events described in the song is a flyer the protagonist receives while walking through campus, which in turn sets them on a path of love, loss, pain, and fulfillment. The chorus uses butterfly imagery to evoke the fragility and unpredictability of our futures, and to reinforce the theory of small moments making big impacts over time. I get really personal in this one, and talk about the two relationships I’ve been in. The first verse is about my first ex. We’re no longer on good terms, and the only song I ever wrote about our breakup was unpublished and will continue to be. The second verse is about my second ex, who is also the subject of The L Word. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve stopped performing that song because we broke up, although we’re still friends. However, I never had the opportunity to write a proper breakup song about him, so I took this opportunity to address them both. The third verse is about my push towards self-actualization, looking forward to the future, using my previous steps to inform my next moves, and struggling to let go of negative ties to the past. It’s funny, I talk about feeling like I finally found The Real Thing and my community, but two years from 2018, things have change d a lot. Turns out what found wasn’t the be-all and end-all of what I was looking for. I realized that I still have a long way to go. Two things worth mentioning upon relistening to this song: “The jump hurt” in verse 3 actually refers to a somewhat serious injury I suffered from a literal jump off a stage in 2016, which coincided with the time I began taking my music project seriously. I vowed to keep pushing forward despite my injury, which in retrospect may have not been the smartest thing to do. But I think it’s worth noting that I basically spent the first two years of my performing career in some sort of chronic pain. Dealing with that pain was also a major source of emotional hardship, which paralleled the growing pains of moving into a new career. “A moment that shook the world” refers to the 2016 election which I spent with my partner at the time, watching the live results. I remember that night really clearly as we were both quite upset and surrounded by people who were crying. It brought us closer because we shared that experience and were there for each other during that hard time. But neither of us could’ve predicted the kind of tragedy that election would mean for us today in 2020. Again, a result of the butterfly effect. Schrodinger’s Heart is a song about thinking through your emotions, confronting uncertainty, and facing your fear of the truth. Schrodinger’s Heart is like a scientific experiment in musical form. Although it’s musically closer to its two siblings in the suite, I actually consider it a thematic cousin of “All The Time”, because both songs take a liberal interpretation of a famous scientific theory and apply it to something decidedly not scientific. Both songs can be described as a scientist’s attempt to quantify attachment and other emotions. Both songs parse spiritual experiences through a logical compiler and see what that yields. At this point in the album, however, the protagonist has had the opportunity to ruminate, self-care, party, vent, and reflect, which means Schrodinger bears a far more positive and encouraging message than its distant cousin. Within the suite, it’s an intermediary between reflection and deconstruction of self. Here are the first signs that they’ve cracked the surface. They acknowledge their rejection anxiety and their fear of the unknown, and imagine a fictional young Schrodinger applying his newly discovered theory to his own personal life. Schrodinger’s Heart doesn’t just break by romantic rejection; anything could be of any outcome until he discovers the truth. Did he want to live a life of knowing or not knowing the truth? Obviously I’m invoking my own anxieties here; for example, I’ve had to work really hard to push myself to open emails I didn’t want to read, even though the result is already decided. It doesn’t change the result whether I open the email or not; the question is do I want to open my eyes to the truth? If it’s already decided, why don’t I just find out? Here’s a quote from a fan that I thought really nailed the core idea of the song: What's the status of Schrodinger's Heart? I find an interesting lyric. If you put your heart in a box for safe keeping, so no one can ever hurt you, you'll never know. If you keep the box closed, you can't connect with other people, but if you open the box you run the risk of getting hurt. As long as the box is closed, you're in a perfect state of probability between being dead inside or being healthy and feeling loved. It’s a dense and somewhat heavy topic, so my instructions to Cecil were to make it melancholy and abstract. At one point, I vocalized two layers of a melody that I came up with to go along with the beat. I told Cecil that I wanted it to sound like a “lonely chorus of ghosts”. Cecil ended up stacking auxiliary harmonies on top of my singing vocals to create that effect. I remember my first reaction to hearing those stacked vocals was “OH MY GOD THIS IS SO FUCKING GOOD I COULD NEVER HAVE THOUGHT OF DOING THAT.” That single moment elevated this song from one I wasn’t sure would work at all, to one I absolutely loved. It was definitely the biggest surprise of the first round of mixdowns I heard, because I wasn’t expecting this song to be much more than “okay”. But I ended up liking it so much that I decided to incorporate that same melody into Loss of Ego, making it a recurring motif in both songs. You can even hear those same stacked harmonies in the background when the motif recurs in Loss of Ego. So, another well-deserved hats-off to Cecil, who made the song more than I ever intended it to be. Loss of Ego is a song about psychedelic experiences, ego death, and our connection to people and the universe. The original working title was “Loss of Ego/Moving Air”. You’ll notice the cut part of the title remains in the second verse. The two verses of the song detail two separate revelatory moments that ultimately helped the protagonist let go of their ego. The first verse aims to capture one’s thinking process during a psychedelic journey. I try to musically reproduce the experience of rapid-fire thoughts, stream of consciousness, vivid imagery, absorption and deconstruction of external stimuli, and the overall inward self-analysis. The protagonist disconnects their identity from their physical body and deconstructs themself into a glowing core of light - think “Truth” from Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Experiencing ego death, they reconsider the meaningfulness of all they thought to be meaningful, and come to a negative conclusion that everything is meaningless. However, when they return to the surface with a sober mind, they no longer fully understand the reasoning behind that conclusion. They can remember the conclusion itself, but not how they got there - which is why this song is also just an approximation of what the whole thing feels like, because it was written above the surface. The only way to make sense of everything and see these revelations as they were meant to be seen is to crack the surface again. The second verse subverts the conclusions of the first verse, via a different psychoactive experience. The protagonist attends a music festival, and from their hotel they hear a mixture of noises coming from the festival grounds. It sounds like a nebulous haze of sound waves colliding against each other and blending together to form a quasi-musical cacophony. It’s a combination of hundreds or even thousands of music shows going on at the same time, in indoor venues and outside stages, combined with the street noise of people and traffic. Regardless, in the state it’s in, the thick gumbo of sound is no longer recognizable as its individual parts. The protagonist deconstructs music the way they deconstructed their own identity. Just as they are made out of light, energy, and atoms, music is a combination of vibrations, passed through a conductive medium to our ears and brains. “Moving Air”, if you will. We know that musicians put a lot of effort into delivering the exact message and sound they want to send into the world. But the protagonist realizes that all of this effort can only be enjoyed at a short distance. A few hundred meters away at most in a concert venue, or a few millimeters away through earbuds. Have that sound travel any further, and it loses the information its creators worked so hard to perfect. By the time it reaches an ear, it can no longer achieve its originally intended purpose. It is no longer music. And it’s this that allows the protagonist to subvert their first conclusion that nothing matters. Humans determine what matters by creating close connections with each other. Perhaps the most important moments are ones we can only share by being close. Talking, listening, touching, tasting, and experiencing in person. Intimacy is the only way we can experience the things we’ve created as they were meant to be. Otherwise it’s all just moving air or moving light waves. We determine what it means to enjoy life to the fullest, and perhaps we can only do it if there are people with whom we can be close, and with whom we can share our world. Even if that’s yourself, and the only intimacy you have is someone speaking to you through your headphones. Closeness matters, which is also why social distancing in the time of pandemic is one of the most difficult challenges for people today. This song is both a really dark and really bright point in the album. On one hand you experience the protagonist falling to their psychological lowest, and completely lose what they believe was their identity. On the other hand we see that they come out on the light end of the tunnel, reformed. It serves as the final narrative inflection point, after which the alteration of the ego is finally complete. So how does this track tie into the rest of the Loss of Ego suite? For one, Loss of Ego shares a musical motif with Schrodinger. The end of Loss of Ego also features the trumpets from The Real Thing, just heavily edited. It’s barely noticeable, but it’s there. And the third verse of The Real Thing actually reflects a changed way of thinking that was triggered by the events in Loss of Ego. So all three tracks interact with each other across time and space, like a cycle of energy and thought. See if you can find connections for yourself. And thus concludes the Loss of Ego suite, and this Alter Ego Explained.
13.
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Disappointment is a song about pedestals, rose colored glasses, and disillusionment in love. It’s a quote-unquote breakup song that, like Infosession, is a loose conglomeration of various real-life romantic connections I’ve had over the years. To not single anyone out, I kept it vague and crafted an abstract imaginary love interest inspired by certain overlaps in my many experiences. Thematically, it lives in the same emotional home as The Redesign; both are melancholy and bittersweet songs about how your feelings for a significant other have changed. Disappointment, however, sounds a lot more like a victory lap. Coming near the end of the album, and right after the mind-altering revelations of “Loss of Ego”, it points to a significant change in the protagonist’s outlook when it comes to love. Disappointment was the only song with a collaborator who I worked with in person. In 2019 Chris Songco and I met up at his apartment in San Francisco to write some music, and we developed a song concept for a old beat of his called French Octopus. I actually first heard French Octopus in 2017 when Chris and I first met, but we never came up with a concept for it beyond the words “lonely octopus”. Sitting down together two years later helped us settle on an idea that was relatable for both of us. In the song, we’re not actually talking to each other, but to our respective disappointments. I think the song can be summed up with what’s probably my favorite line: “Put you up too high, now you’re letting me down. Now I can see the sky better as I’m hitting the ground.” During this session Chris also came up with the chorus, of which he sent me two versions. We both agreed that despite bearing some resemblance to “Closer” by the Chainsmokers, the chorus was good and very catchy. It also inspired me to use a more singsongy rapping style throughout the song, to match Chris’s natural style. After the session, I was asked to choose between the two lyrical versions of the chorus, and my decision was: “Why not both?” I liked the idea of the second version being a bridgelike transition into the final chorus, and it worked out great. The peppy yet melancholy beat, which Chris described as feeling like “a lonely octopus traveling the world”, lent itself really well to a bittersweet, wistfully hopeful song about heartbreak and personal growth. Sup, I’m Chris Songco, the producer and feature vocalist on track 15 off Alter Ego “Disappointment”. Lol yeah this song is super real. It’s about putting another person on a pedestal. Getting lost in the sauce of who you idealize them to be and how you see yourself feeling when you’re with them. All these fantasies. This track is a cold bucket of water to the face, telling you that even a person you really really like is far from perfect, you know? They have flaws, lapses in judgment, and they can definitely disappoint you. This beat in my catalog was originally called “Lonely Octopus” which kinda matches cuz an octopus has a lot of limbs. Limbs that can reach for an infinite amount of objects the same way we reach for an infinite amount of excuses to be treated poorly by someone we’ve given too much power to. Sorry im really a sadboi so, uh yeah. When labbing the song, LEX and I came up with a few different choruses. One had to do with the metaphor of building somebody up on a structure and then not being able to reach them. The other dealt with more, like, astrological metaphors of seeing someone like a star deity or constellation that they wish to. I’m really glad we are able to incorporate both of those ideas into this song and have them speak to the main message. Overall, Disappointment is a very personal song and I hope listeners can relate to it and reflect on areas where they may be too bedazzled to see reality. I wish you all well. And thus concludes this Alter Ego Explained.
14.
Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained. Retcon Artist is a song about wanting to change the past, and the cyclical nature of regret and shame. It was the last song I finished for the album. The beat for this song originated from a musical motif and rough draft I composed, titled “Trap experiment sad bside”. The harp synth, main acoustic guitar riff, and violin melody were present in that demo, but the beat was originally a trap beat with 808 hi hats and snares. After tweaking the beat around a bit, I decided that it needed live instrumentation, which moved the entire track away from trap and towards a rap-rock sound. I ditched the trap drums in favor of realistic rock drums, saturating and distorting them for a really nasty overblown sound. Then I hired Mikal kHill, who you heard earlier in Self Care, to play acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and electric bass to fill out the track. The song is heavily influenced by the concept of time travel, especially going back in time to change major life events that are sources of regret and shame. You know when you close your eyes and suddenly remember a cringy fifth grade moment? It’s that feeling. The message I try to convey is that doing so is essentially futile, since changing external events and appearances does nothing to change the internal constructs of shame that you’ve developed over time. One of the things that inspired the song was rediscovering some of my old journals and written projects that I wrote in word documents, dating all the way back to 2010 and older. Reading old journals is something I really enjoy doing, since it offers a look in the near or distant past, along with the feelings and mindset I had at the time. It’s a snapshot of a former me, which I find valuable when I want to analyze how I’ve grown and changed over time. Upon reading some of these documents, I discovered that a lot of the core issues I wrote about five to ten years ago remain unchanged. In these journals, memoirs, essays, and even school assignments, I wrote about being uncertain for the future, wanting to fulfill a greater purpose, searching for a career that would make me truly happy and self-actualized, feeling conflicted about my social and cultural obligations, and worrying that I’ll never be in a relationship. You know, just human things. Things that come up over and over and over again in Alter Ego, Raging Ego, and basically all of my music. I realized then that despite all the growth, improvements, and change I’ve pushed myself to do over the years, through hardship and success, my core concerns and neuroses haven’t changed much at all. I still think and write about the same things. I began to visualize it as one big time loop that I can never escape: even if I go back and change certain events of my past, things will still happen the same way because of who I am at the core. Constantly changing and improving yourself, whether it’s working towards the future or hypothetically editing the past, ultimately does nothing if you don’t fix the underlying thoughts and emotions causing your own lack of self-worth. I wanted to capture this phenomenon of a “cycle of cringe”, something I experience often, where I look back at things I wrote a year, a month, or even a day ago. I change and improve for tomorrow, but it doesn’t stop me from cringing AGAIN when I look back on the me of today, which is now yesterday. Becoming a better person isn’t changing the root of the shame. It’s the unwillingness to forgive myself. I imagined my many alter egos, who all want different things, interfering with my personal process of healing and forgiveness. “Sending a text back” is a direct reference to the anime Steins;Gate, specifically Season 1. SPOILERS AHEAD. In Steins;Gate, the main character figures out a way to jump across different “world-lines” where certain events occurred differently, based on a text he sends to someone on a past date. Each of these texts creates a new timeline, which is like an alternate universe, with only the main character hopping timelines noticing what has changed. So I imagined my main ego trying to change the past by sending texts to past selves at key moments in their life - April 2015, December of 2016, and so on - and ending up with multiple timelines where things happened differently, none of which actually fix the protagonist’s self-hate or inability to heal. The protagonist regrets sharing too much, yet continues to do so; eventually they realize that the problem comes from their early childhood development, which has resulted in expressing emotions outwardly in unhealthy ways, instead of accepting them privately. I wanted the song to feel both unresolved and resolved, just like the cycle of trying to better oneself, so I reflected that by making the music and lyrics sound conclusive but still somewhat open-ended. Again, I want to shout-out Cecil for not only the overall engineering job, but the fantastic drop that happens at 3:36. I received an email from him after sending in all my vocals. He said that the way I had arranged the third repetition of the chorus didn’t give it the conclusiveness I was going for, so he added a drop out, some extra drums, and a guitar line that follows the violin line. I was completely floored at how well he captured the explosiveness I wanted for the final chorus, which I had been building up to but couldn’t execute properly. It makes the serenity of the outro really shine, especially when the acoustic guitar and piano come in to gently lead the listener out of their experience. He helped the track achieve a perfect contrast between the storm and the calm that comes after. And for that and all the other tracks, I have to take my hat off to Cecil, the true magician of this album. One of the things that has made working with Lex fun as a producer, is she has more of a songwriter’s sense than a lot of rappers do when they come to you asking for beats, and she knows enough about composition and music theory that she can bring you something. Even when she wants a beat from you, she might already have the melody or the chords worked out. Which has been the case on stuff we’ve worked with before. So when she asked me to do this song, it was interesting because it was the first time she’d have me kind of come in just as a session musician, and she had written out parts already that she had sequenced out with programming and then she asked me to recreate those with live instruments. So I played my acoustic guitar, which is like a little epiphone dreadnought that I use, this acoustic electric, so I used that for the acoustic parts. And then I have a hoffner bass that has a McCartney violin style semi hollow bass, and I ran that into a vox pedal I have that emulates different types of cabinets, and just overloaded the hell out of it, to play some of the heavy chords in the song. And for the actual electric guitar parts I also played, I have a Gretsch hollow body that I play through a vox AC30, it’s tube powered and I just overload the fuck out the of the tubes, and then, no distortion pedals, just straight up overdriven. As soon as I would stop playing the guitar, it would be like *WEEHHHHH* howling feedback. So the guitars are mixed really well by Cecil, so it doesn’t sound overwhelming, but the original tracks I recorded were super gnarly. And I did a bunch of layers of them, playing deeper chords, and also played the power chords on the bass, and ran those through it, through the AC 30 also overloaded. So that I’d be able to get a really… when she sent me the original programming some of the chords on the heavy parts were played really low on keyboard, and that’s deeper than you’re normally gonna tune your guitar, so I played power chords on a bass, and just overdrove the tubes really hard for that. And it came out with a really cool, thick sound. I’m really happy with how that song came out. I think she did a really cool job with the composition. It deals a lot with sparsity, and that’s been a big thing for me for a long time. I used to call myself - it was a joke on what MC Lars had done with post punk laptop rap. I started calling myself sad-core minimalist doom rap. The minimalist thing was something I tried to do with my band, where I’d tell everybody, when we were trying to come up with my arrangements, I would be like, I want you to play as few notes as possible. There should be no extra notes in this. The raps are gonna be fast, and energetic, so we don’t need a billion instruments playing a billion things a second. We need a lot of space. And I like that the arrangement she had come up with for that really utilized sparsity effectively in a way that was interesting sonically and gave her raps a lot of room to breathe. And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. Now that it’s all over, I do I wish that I could go back when…
15.
Conclusion 02:30
Special thank you to my Patreons: Angelo Knapp Felix Prasarn Ben Stark Clarke Cummings Andrew Smith Randy Hardenbrook Luis Mora Darnoc Ryan Liu Abrahan Rosa Lauren Haffner Evan Cutler The Ginger Ginger AJ Marotto Megawave Drew Maynard Elena Caple Jeff Simpson Erek Jayme Lewis Cecil Lewis Shauna Harris Alan Fregtman Wyatt Lennon Stewart DayExMok David Crawford Maxine Filcher Jeffrey Bearce Candy Downey Dade Jason Freund R. Chad Burrell Chris Ehrman Jonas Klarstrup Eloise Warren Phillip Dodson Norman McDonald Magdalen Blankenship Chris Morris Ryan Spence Jake Richmond Rebecca S LowEndLem Cynna James Brady Richard Kichenama Dave Heffington Anthony Courtney Tim Gracie Dominic Mah Simulation Lady Ademordna Edward Jones Whitey Nate Strickland TorMelkson Lily Stricklin Dara Monasch Jason Brand BentRider David E Smith Robert Megan Haffner The Grammar Club Christopher Berg Sean McAfee PudDlez Chewy Shaw Curtis Bostick Lucas Zeilman Jordan Henry Bateman Willem Jager Brandon Pace Mike Swaby Chad Walker Kent Ward Matthew Odom Daniel M Robinson

about

"Alter Ego Explained" is a commentary series on "Alter Ego". LEX and a variety of musical collaborators explore the themes, concepts, inspirations, stories, and creative processes behind each song.

"Alter Ego Explained" is a Patreon-funded project. For early access to more projects, check out patreon.com/lextheconartist

credits

released July 3, 2020

Album cover photo by PixelJournalism

Special thanks to these artists for their commentary:

Ronin Op F
Shubzilla
Mikal kHill
Klopfenpop
Schaffer the Darklord
Chris Songco

Thank you to my Patreons:

Angelo Knapp
Felix Prasarn
Ben Stark
Clarke Cummings
Andrew Smith
Randy Hardenbrook
Luis Mora
Darnoc
Ryan Liu
Abrahan Rosa
Lauren Haffner
Evan Cutler
The Ginger Ginger
AJ Marotto
Megawave
Drew Maynard
Elena Caple
Jeff Simpson
Erek
Jayme Lewis
Cecil Lewis
Shauna Harris
Alan Fregtman
Wyatt
Lennon Stewart
DayExMok
David Crawford
Maxine Filcher
Jeffrey Bearce
Candy Downey
Dade
Jason Freund
R. Chad Burrell
Chris Ehrman
Jonas Klarstrup
Eloise Warren
Phillip Dodson
Norman McDonald
Magdalen Blankenship
Chris Morris
Ryan Spence
Jake Richmond
Rebecca S
LowEndLem
Cynna
James Brady
Richard Kichenama
Dave Heffington
Anthony Courtney
Tim Gracie
Dominic Mah
Simulation
Lady Ademordna
Edward Jones
Whitey
Nate Strickland
TorMelkson
Lily Stricklin
Dara Monasch
Jason Brand
BentRider
David E Smith
Robert
Megan Haffner
The Grammar Club
Christopher Berg
Sean McAfee
PudDlez
Chewy Shaw
Curtis Bostick
Lucas Zeilman
Jordan
Henry Bateman
Willem Jager
Brandon Pace
Mike Swaby
Chad Walker
Kent Ward
Matthew Odom
Daniel M Robinson

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LEX the Lexicon Artist New York, New York

LEX the Lexicon Artist combines Internet culture, fandom, punk ethos, and shock humor (not the mean kind) to create an over-the-top explosion of nerdy, dirty, funny raps.

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